I am Founder and Principal at Bersin by Deloitte, leading provider of research-based membership programs in human resources (HR), talent and learning. Hundreds of the Global 2000 and Fortune 1000 use our proven people strategies to drive exceptional business results.

I've spent much of my career in technology, sales, marketing, and business leadership and I actively write about major global trends in leadership, management, HR and talent management technologies. I live in the San Francisco area, close enough to Silicon Valley to keep up with new technology and its impact on the business of talent.

Social Recruiting Goes Wild

Now that LinkedIn has demonstrated the huge opportunity to build social tools for corporate recruiting, the startup wars have begun.

Dozens of companies are now launching tools to help recruiters find candidates and candidates find jobs. And in the middle of this, another set of startups is trying to automate the “part-time” work environment, enabling people without full-time work to find part-time gigs.

The recruiting market is very large (we estimate over $140 billion is spent by US corporations alone, to say nothing of all the money spent by candidates trying to find jobs), so there is a lot of opportunity for disruption and new businesses.

Think about it this way. Every year, regardless of the economy, around 40 million people change jobs in the US alone. There is a huge need for tools to make this whole matching game easier.

Let me highlight a few of these exciting young companies:

Path.to and Bright: These companies try to mine your social graph and “find jobs” for you. So far they’re just getting started so the matching isn’t very good yet, but the potential is big. Think e-harmony for the job seeker.

Identified.com: a new “gamification” type of job search system which gives job candidates a “score” based on their social connections, experiences, and perceived skills. A “data science” company which hopes employers will be able to use this “score” to assess candidates (just received $21M in capital).

Recmnd.me is a “recommendation building” tool for candidates, it lets you promote and create more recommendations through your social network.

Smarterer helps you as a job candidate prove your skills by taking assessments, helping candidates and recruiters better find validated skills (LinkedIn is working on this).

Zao is building a system to create referrals through your social network, enabling you or employers to give referral fees to anyone who suggests you or others for a position.

Gild, a fascinating new company that actually locates and evaluates your code (if you’re a computer programmer) and sends evaluation scores to prospective employers. More to come from these folks.

TalentBin: Gives recruiters an intelligent tool to find people through their social graph. Kind of the opposite of Path.to and Bright.

Startwire gives candidates updates on the status of their applications. It’s like a “Tracking System” for all your job applications. Not a bad idea, considering the fact that over 70% of all applications get no response at all.

Jobvite: A fast-growing company which delivers referral recruiting tools, applicant tracking, and advertisement management tools for recruiters. Gooodjob is a startup building a similar offering.

In the assessment market there are dozens. EmployInsight is a new company which collects candidate data and offers in-line assessments online, attempting to build up a global skills database.

Bullhorn: one of the biggest end-to-end social talent acquisition solutions, focused on the staffing industry (recently acquired by Vista Equity).

Jobs2Web: (acquired by SuccessFactors) a candidate marketing and analysis system that helps recruiting organizations manage the recruitment marketing process.

SmartRecruiters: a no-cost (yes, free) cloud-based applicant tracking and social recruiting system which lets recruiters post jobs on Facebook with the click of a button.

LinkedIn Talent Pipeline: a new offering from LinkedIn that lets recruiters manage the end-to-end interactions of all their candidates (including social activity) throughout the recruitment process.

BraveNewTalent: Creates professional communities and entices candidates to find employers (and vice-versa) by matching their interests and needs. TalentCircles and SelectMinds have similar offerings.

GigWalk, Freelancer, TaskRabbit, eLance, Odesk: Contract work systems that help people post their skills and project managers look for skilled people for project work. These systems are becoming location-aware so many run on a mobile device and can show you local gigs automatically.

ViewsOnYou and Glassdoor: ViewsOnYou lets you do a 360 assessment of yourself and match yourself against others and potential employers. Glassdoor does the opposite – it forces employers to do a 360 whether they like it or not (employees and former employees rate the employer).

Work4Labs, Tweetmyjobs, Tweetajob, and many others help recruiters rapidly use Facebook or Twitter to post and tweet job openings to communities and audiences. Work4Labs (Work4Us) is a complete Facebook application platform that lets recruiter build a Facebook recruiting site, similar to the “career pages” you can develop on LinkedIn.

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Among all of these, the ones I’ve used the most are the contract work systems (odesk, freelancer and elance) and even a full-time work system from Staff.com.

The surge in outsourcing is basically the reason why all of this is happening. Remote workers have grown in number and businesses have been utilizing their services mostly because of cost considerations.

Nice post. Would like to suggest an addition WeGoLook.com similar to TaskRabbit and Zaarly. WeGoLook is a great resource for nationwide tasking and reporting featuring a vast network of “Lookers” who provide custom tasking, dynamic data capture, personalized report templates and much more.

GooodJob offers a fresh approach to internal sourcing by combining the power and scope of social media networks with referral programs. Their Employee Referral Platform effectively leverages employees’ social media networks to share job positions with their wide networks of qualified candidates, and successfully motivates long-term participation in referral programs.

I invite readers to visit the GooodJob website and get started on taking their referral programs to the next level today! http://gooodjob.com/

Anyone who likes to discuss the opportunities of social recruiting in person may meet us at Europe´s largest human resources trade in Cologne Germany Wednesday 29. Feel free to contact us: http://www.1000headhunter.de

Josh, I would like to receive your review or perhaps include MyParichay as an upcoming platform on Facebook. This platform signifies a total end-end talent hiring solution on facebook from branding, referral generation to candidate search for recruiters and more over a board for all to view jobs and finally apply! Regards, Nikhil

ReqCloud enables recruiters and hiring managers to leverage social media to market jobs to candidates, provides network insights for candidates that might be looking to change jobs, and improves both the recruitment process and overall candidate experience.

This is an amazing list of companies and to add one more…. WorkedWith.com (http://app.workedwith.com) We are a Job Reference Management tools AKA: LinkedIn Recommendations On Steroids. WorkedWith eliminates the annoyance of chasing down former and current co-workers to ask them for references and recommendations. Just ask them once, we will verify who they are, call and interview them and that’s it. Candidates can share their references up front and get through the hiring process quicker.